Balan Wonderworld
PlayStation 4
Nostalgia Factor:
Balan Wonderworld came out exactly one month ago on March 26th, making it the newest game I’ve ever reviewed for this blog. I almost never play anything brand-new anymore. What makes this game different?
Well, not much. I didn’t even know this game existed until I saw it appear on the GameFly website as a new arrival back in March. Immediately the art style and the interesting title grabbed my attention. I googled the game and saw that it was made by the same people who did Sonic the Hedgehog and Nights into Dreams. That was all I needed to hear. I put this on my GameFly queue, and within a day or two it was being shipped to my house.
I should have stopped to read the reviews for this game before so hastily adding it to my queue. If I had seen how poorly received this game was, I may have opted for something else. While this game isn’t as terrible as the reviews make it out to be, it still isn’t very good. Read on for my full thoughts.
Story:
This should be a short recap, because to be honest with you, I had absolutely no idea what was happening as I played this game. It doesn’t help that the disc arrived with no instruction manual, and the game itself literally explains nothing as you play.
Balan Wonderworld seems to draw a lot of inspiration from Nights into Dreams, which you would think would be a good thing. You’ve got animated characters who don’t speak navigating bizarre dream situations and fighting bizarre dream creatures. From what I could observe, you help people who have endured some kind of tragic event or have lived some kind of unfulfilled life. You do it by… going into their dreams and fighting off dark forces who have invaded their minds? I don’t freaking know. The game explains nothing.
All in all there are 12 worlds, meaning 12 people you have to help out. Along the way you encounter the character Balan, who was clearly inspired by Nights from Nights into Dreams. If you told me that these two series were related somehow, I would believe you without a doubt. But whereas Nights kind of made sense, this game doesn’t. In fact, I completely stopped paying attention after it became clear that this game’s storyline was 100% nonsensical. I’d look at my phone or do something else while the cutscenes played. It didn’t even matter to me anymore. I began to play for the gameplay and the gameplay alone. But to be honest with you, that isn’t very good either.
Gameplay:
On paper this game should work. You’ve got 12 stages, each of which contains 3 levels – 2 normal levels and a boss level. You have to play through these stages, collecting Balan statues as you go. These statues act like the stars in Super Mario 64 or the puzzle pieces in Banjo-Kazooie. You need to collect them to make your way deeper into the game.
Gameplay itself is very simple. You control your base character, who can only jump and can’t damage enemies. As you play you collect different outfits that you change into. You can store up to three outfits in your inventory at a time. These outfits are what you use to solve the game’s puzzles and fight its enemies. A few examples of outfits are:
- A spider suit that lets you climb spider webs
- A dolphin suit that lets you swim through water columns
- A grasshopper that shoots blades out in front of you to damage your enemies
- A cat that allows you to float through the sky
- A lizard that allows you to use your tongue to grab onto objects and pull you across chasms
- A pig that does a butt-smash in mid-air to destroy blocks or enemies below you
So on and so forth. While this is fine in theory, it is also seriously flawed. You control each of these characters using the analog stick, which is expected. The problem is, you only use ONE button – the action button. So if you are playing as the blade throwing grasshopper, the action button launches your blades. You can’t jump. You can’t do anything else. All you can do is launch blades. If you encounter a platform that you need to jump on, you have to switch your outfit to another character, like the spider. If you don’t have any outfits in your inventory that allow you to jump, you have to backtrack until you can locate one. There are checkpoints located throughout each stage that allow you to access old costumes that you have saved, but I always found it to be a pain in the butt to use these changing rooms because they take so freaking long to load. They really couldn’t have come up with a better way to help you change costumes? Or at least given every character the ability to jump?
The constant costume changing definitely becomes a chore. If you get hit even once, you lose whatever costume you happen to be wearing. Sometimes in order to advance, you need a costume that you found in a previous level. If you get hit and lose your costume, you have to go allll the way back and re-collect the missing costume, and hope you don’t get hit again. Ugh.
Not to say this game is difficult. If anything, it is absurdly easy. I don’t know if this is geared towards kids or what, but I only “died” once or twice the whole way through. The boss fights in particular are just laughable. These bosses follow extremely predictable patterns, and all you have to do is hit them three times to kill them. There are an endless number of outfits which respawn in the boss arenas too, which makes these fights even more of a cakewalk.
If this game offers any challenge whatsoever, it is in the location of the Balan statues. Seriously. Some of them are SO hard to find, or hidden in ridiculously obscure locations. To collect many of them you have to just skip over them and come back when you’ve completed a later level and have the proper outfit to collect them. For example, in the first stage of the game you need the spider outfit to climb a web and collect a Balan statue, but the spider outfit doesn’t become available till later in the game. So you have to remember where this web is and come back when you’ve collected the spider suit. This is a pretty common thing in games nowadays, but for whatever reason it doesn’t quite work in Balan Wonderworld. I think a lot it has to do with the fact that it often isn’t clear which one of the dozens of suits you need or what exactly you have to do to collect these statues. I won’t lie – I had to look online MANY times because I was so stumped. Every single time I needed a certain number of Balan statues to unlock the next set of levels, I was short. Could I find the required number on my own? No. Unlike Mario or Banjo-Kazooie, which give you hints as to where to find the next piece you need, this game gives you nothing. Literally, nothing.
Another thing I hated about this game: the Balan bouts. Again this is a thing that on paper should have worked. It’s a simple bonus game where you have to hit the action button as your character’s shadow lines up with him. Do it a certain number of times, getting an excellent each time, and you unlock a Balan statue. I consider myself to be pretty good at quick-time or fast rhythm button pressing games, but even I struggled with these Balan bouts. It seemed like every single time I played one of these I would just randomly lose for no reason whatsoever. To make things worse, these Balan bouts disappear until you beat that stage’s final boss again. So if I lost a Balan bout on stage 5, level 1, I would have to play through all of stage 5’s levels, beating the boss at the end, before I could come back and do the Balan bout again. And if I happened to lose one more time? Gotta do it all over again. No. Just no. To make matters worse, these Balan bouts get REALLY lengthy towards the end of the game. You have to watch this big long sequence that you can’t skip. It is SO annoying. Easily my least favorite part of this whole game.
Last thing I’ll mention before I move on is the game’s overworld. It is a floating island filled with these puffy creatures that remind me a bit of the Chaos from Sonic Adventure. It is never explained what you need to do on this island, but as I played I figured it out slowly. You have to feed these puffy creatures the gems you earned in each level. Feed them enough and they’ll throw themselves into this big machine/tower thing that begins running a tally of how many creatures it has consumed. Once the tally hits a certain amount you unlock another level on the tower. What exactly this does or how it benefits you at all, I have no idea. I wasted a lot of time feeding this freaking machine only to look online and see that I was nowhere near completing it. I said fuck it and stopped even bothering. Seriously, you need to collect SO MANY gems to unlock each stage of this tower. I finished this game about four or five days ago, but I would STILL be playing it if I was trying to unlock the entire tower. I’d probably be playing it a month from now. No. Too big of a time commitment. Not happening. This game isn’t even fun to begin with. What makes you think I want to play through each level 90 times, collecting every gem in sight? Not gonna happen.
Graphics:
I’ve never been more conflicted regarding a game’s graphics in my life. On the surface it is a fun, colorful, vibrant cartoon-like world come to life. There’s a lot of fun lighting and water visual effects. Some trippy colors and shit. But when you really, REALLY look at the game it becomes less and less impressive. Yes, everything overall looks “nice”, but also very basic at the same time. Basic textures, basic environments. Enemy design is bland. Honestly, this game looks like it could have done on the Wii over ten years ago. Maybe that’s a bit too harsh, but probably very close to the truth.
Compare this game to something like the recently released Spyro and Crash Bandicoot collections and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
Sound:
If there is a bright spot to this game, it is its sound. The music is fun. There are a ton of catchy beats. As much as I hated the Balan bouts, the music for them is great and often got stuck in my head even when I wasn’t playing the game. The sounds effects are all really good too. Some of these effects (like when you collect a gem) sound like they’ve been pulled directly from Nights into Dreams. It definitely tickled my nostalgia bone in a good way to hear all these classic sounds one more time.
Overall:
Ugh. I came into this review thinking I was going to give it a higher score than all the people who gave it failing grades, but the more I write the more and more I realize how much I dislike this game. It isn’t necessarily a horrible game or one that I hated playing. It is just SO flawed and SO dull.
I can’t possibly give this game a good score. But I’m not going to give it a failing one either. To me, this game wasn’t THAT bad to the point where I would give it an F. It was playable. It was fun at times. Overall it was pretty crummy, but I wouldn’t say it was a complete failure. I’m sure little kids who don’t know any better would probably love this game. That’s got to count for something, right?
I’m grasping at straws here. This isn’t a good game. I can’t recommend it to anyone. It’s just not very good. This is such a disappointment coming from the minds who brought me Sonic the Hedgehog and Nights into Dreams, two classic series that hold a great deal of nostalgia for me. As I’ve said many times throughout this review – on paper or in theory this game and the things it tries to do SHOULD work. They just don’t. To me that’s just bad execution and bad game design. I can’t forgive that, no matter who made this game.
Overall:
D-
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